The Most Intuitive Alphabet: Hangeul and Its Many Charms
Photo: Evelyn Chai from Pixabay
In contemporary South Korea, October 9 is celebrated as “Hangeul Day” to highlight the role of the written language in Korean language and identity, with the Korean Ministry of Culture carrying out Hangeul celebrations throughout the month of October each year, including dictation contests, lecture series, and open calligraphy classes. This script is uniquely Korean, and heralded across South Korea as a marker of Korean national identity and Korean innovation.
The contemporary Korean writing system, Hangeul, is remarkably intuitive to learn, needing only a few hours to grasp the basic syllabic structure and characters. This is in sharp contrast to its complex, logographic neighbors, written Traditional Chinese or Japanese Kanji, where fluency requires memorization of thousands of characters, each corresponding to individual words.
Hangeul’s simple design is intentional, explicitly derived to increase the literacy of the Korean populace starting in the 15th century. The result is a highly intuitive writing system where many letters correspond to the shape of the tongue when making the sound. For example:
The consonant ㄴ, which makes the “n” sound, mimics the shape the tongue makes, flattened and pressed against the upper teeth to produce the sound.
The vowels ㅣ, ㅏ, and ㅓ all draw the relationship from the narrow “ee” sound in the back of the throat: ㅣforms the “ee/i” vowel. The sound moves forward to produce the “ㅏ/ah” sound, shown by the rightmost horizontal line, and the sound moves backward in the throat to produce the “ㅓ/eo” vowel. The horizontal dash’s orientation corresponds with the vowel placement in the mouth.
In this way, the shapes of many Hangeul characters are quick and intuitive to learn by simply connecting the sound drawn in the shape of the character to the shape of the mouth.
This ease of learning is intentional; Hangeul was initially designed in the 15th century to be an accessible, written language alternative to the more complex, Chinese-character-based Hanja writing system, which was primarily restricted to the elite. King Sejong, seeking to instill Confucian ethics and various farming and medical techniques into the population, was determined to design a new alphabet suited to spoken Korean and effective for educating the population (although Hanja remained the predominant written language of the elite until the mid-20th century).
Hangeul, like many other writing systems, dictates an expected stroke order for writing the characters, generally following the principles of left to right and top to bottom. The language follows a syllabic structure, with letters clustered in two to five-letter, square-shaped blocks to form each syllable.
Hangeul underwent several significant shifts during the 20th century. First, as it became more broadly adopted by all classes. Secondly, as a result of Western influence, spaces as word separators were formally added into the language in 1933. Thirdly, under Japanese imperial oppression, Japanese was forced upon the Korean populace, and those who spoke in Korean, or wrote in Hangeul, were punished. Yet despite the suppression of Hangeul, using the Korean language as a tool of protest continued. Students would submit blank answer sheets during Japanese exams, and teachers would surreptitiously use Korean language or history textbooks, rather than Japanese ones, to retain Korean national identity. In this way, to use Hangeul became an act of rebellion and Korean national autonomy against Japanese oppression and assimilation policies.
Today, Hangeul is a point of pride for the Korean people, praised by linguists and ethnographers for its functional design and ease of comprehension. The Cia-Cia language of the southeastern Indonesian City of Baubau utilizes Hangeul as its writing system, preserving the dying indigenous language. Originally passed down only orally, the language was at risk of disappearing. Linguistic preservationists initially tried transliterating the language into the Arabic script, but in 2009, Hangeul was found to be the closest aligned to existing Cia-Cia pronunciations. Borrowing both from modern Hangeul characters, but also antiquated ones, which are no longer used in contemporary Korean, the Cia-Cia tribe now has a means of documenting and preserving their language. Likewise, Jeju-eo, the indigenous language of Jeju island, uses Hangeul as its written script, with the addition of one letter “ㆍ” to notate the “aw” sound that exists in Jeju-eo but not in Korean.
Hangeul calligraphy, itself an art form, was designated a “National Intangible Cultural Heritage” in 2024. Hangeul calligraphers use a traditional inkstick and brush, emerging as an alternative to traditional Hanja calligraphy, and becoming an emerging market for Korean graphics and font design.
As modern-day South Korea evolves, so too does Hangeul, adapting to a globalized, digital era with keyboard adoption and converting loan words from English into Hangeul equivalents like 컴퓨터 (keompyuteo) for “computer” and 커피 (keopi) for “coffee.”
October 9, 2025 marks the 579th anniversary of King Sejong the Great proclaiming the use of Hangeul throughout Joseon. Today, half a millennium later, Hangeul has evolved into a method for resistance, knowledge, adaptivity, heritage, and functionality; it is a symbol and cornerstone of Korean identity.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Hangul". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Oct. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hangul-Korean-alphabet. Accessed 27 October 2025.
Minjung (Michelle) Hur, Hangeul as a Tool of Resistance Against Forced Assimilation: Making Sense of the Framework Act on Korean Language, 27 WASH. INT’L L.J. 715 (2018).
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/world/asia/indonesia-korea-hangul.html